Creationist museum opens its doors

A museum of creationism, the belief that the bible is the literal truth and the Earth is only 6,000 years old, has opened in Kentucky.

The Creation Museum has taken $27m of private funding to build, and professes to tell the entire story of the world beginning a little over 6,000 years ago with the Garden of Eden.

"We have given people an opportunity to hear information that is not readily available ... to challenge them that you can believe the Bible's history," Ken Ham, president of the Answers in Genesis group that founded the museum, told Reuters.

Exhibits include demonstrations of how the Grand Canyon was made in a few weeks by the waters of the Great Flood, and how dinosaurs and humans co-existed and were carried on Noah's Ark.

"Teachers don't deserve a student coming into class saying 'Gee Mrs Brown, I went to this fancy museum and it said you're teaching me a lie,"' Dr Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, told reporters before the museum opened.

The opening did not pass without incident. A humanist group flew a banner over the museum proclaiming 'Thou shalt not lie', while other groups protested about the anti-science and overly religious nature of the museum.

"This opposition hates the fact that the Creation Museum is showing the world that the Bible's history is confirmed by real science, and that if the history is true (which it is) the gospel based in that history is true," said Ham.

Over 50 per cent of Americans said in a recent poll that humans did not evolve and were created at some point in the last 10,000 years.

In a recent presidential debate among Republican contenders for the presidency, three of the candidates said that they did not believe in evolution.